


in another life (you can remember once)

by deletable_bird



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human/Troll Society, Anger, Angst, Angst and Feels, Arguing, Best Friends, Blood, Blood and Injury, Canonical Character Death, Cell Phones, Character Death, Conversations, Death, Feels, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Heavy Angst, Injury, Lectures, Love Confessions, M/M, Major Character Injury, Male Friendship, Male-Female Friendship, Memorials, OTP Feels, Old Friends, POV Dave Strider, POV Karkat Vantas, POV other people probably, Phone Calls & Telephones, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Promises, Sad, Sadstuck, Unrequited Love, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-08-27
Packaged: 2018-04-15 03:39:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4591563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deletable_bird/pseuds/deletable_bird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Contacts, previous calls, there he was. Always right at the top, always there. Annoying but undeniably, dependably there. Never could resist a chance to run his mouth.</p><p>One ring, two, three, three and a half and he picked up. Clicking and static, and then his voice, with a smile in it.</p><p>
  <em>“Yo, wassup, Kitkat?”</em>
</p><p> “Your fucking ego, dumbass,” Karkat replied. He was smiling now. Who smiled on their deathbed even. “So far up that it’s stuck in God’s asshole.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The blade was there and gone with a surreal speed, black metal slicing through clothes and skin and his insides with something not quite yet pain but sure to be soon. Karkat could hear the faint crackle of Bec Noir there and gone, and his knees buckled. Literally just stopped working. His hands clamped involuntarily over his stomach, hot red slowly soaking through his shirt, but pain flared into existence like a match at the pressure of his arms and he let go of himself with a choked gasping sound.

He slumped sideways, pathetic and losing strength fast. It took him far too long to realize he wasn’t breathing, and when he started again, gasping in sharp harsh gasps, half-panicking, a hot, sharp stabbing sensation shot through his torso so intensely he let out a high, quickly cut-off whimper. Punctured lung probably. Punctured everything, actually. A dull kind of insistent, agonizing ache shot through with slightly more defined cramping stabs every time he moved.

He could barely feel the rock underneath him. Was he floating? he might be floating. His brain was clouded but racing. Call for help. No. There was no help anymore. Who was the last person he would talk to? Whose voice did he want to die with in his ears?

Fucking poetry. Not his forte, stop trying. Letting out little gasps at irregular intervals, Karkat worked his hand into his pocket and managed to get ahold of the phone Jade had gotten for him. Smeared with red from the blood on his hand. Battery almost dead. Still. Just one last call. Shitty thing could hold out for his last call.

Contacts, previous calls, there he was. Always right at the top, always there. Annoying but undeniably, dependably there. Never could resist a chance to run his mouth.

He propped the phone against his hand and a rock and also his shoulder maybe so that he could hear it while not having to move. Not moving was a good plan. The less pain he could leave with, the better.

One ring, two, three, three and a half and he picked up. Clicking and static, and then his voice, with a smile in it.

_“Yo, wassup, Kitkat?”_

“Your fucking ego, dumbass,” Karkat replied. He was smiling now. Who smiled on their deathbed even. “So far up that it’s stuck in God’s asshole.”

 _“Wow, rude,”_ Dave said. More clicking, more static. The sound of repositioning a phone, settling in for a conversation. _“Why have I been graced with your sublime tones, then? What’s the deal?”_

“N—” The inhale had sent another dull knife up his ribcage. His words cut off in a choked kind of moan, almost too faint to hear. He got himself together. “Nothing much. Just . . . wanted to talk to you.”

 _“Senpai noticed me,”_ came the instant reply. _“I don’t even know what to say. Seriously, Karkat, what’s going on?”_

“Nothing, really!” The shout pole was almost too hard to enunciate. “Can we not have a simple, sane conversation one time? Is it too hard for you to refrain from referring to people as beautiful anime and quit with the metaphors?”

It was too quiet, his voice too weak and even. His efforts to minimize the pain were too obvious.

 _“Okay, okay fine,”_ and Karkat breathed out a careful sigh of relief. _“What do you want to talk about? I stopped by Idea-mart earlier and they were fresh out of new stuff. Said the delivery guy never showed up, we’ll keep you in mind next time, sorry for the inconvenience, bye.”_

“Don’t really care,” he half-whispered, focusing on the details. The faint layer of static that covered Dave’s voice. The way the edges of the blood smeared on his hand was beginning to dry, and crack, just like the edges of his world. “Just talk. I want to listen. Please.”

 _“Okay,”_ Dave said, and launched immediately into a soothing tirade of absolute nonsense. Karkat listened like the words were water and he were dying of thirst. Okay yeah shittiest dying metaphor ever but he was kind of short on ideas right now with a candy-red pool of his life slowly spreading wider on the black rock.

“Dave,” he interrupted, and the rant stopped abruptly in the middle of something about kombucha and its absolute uselessness. _“Yeah?”_

“Thanks,” Karkat managed, his voice raspy. Almost gone. “Just, yeah. Thanks. I love you.”

Wow, awkward transition of the sweep. But a huff of amusement traveled through the airwaves from Dave’s mouth to Karkat’s ear, and he could hear the grin in his voice as he said _“Okay. I love you too. There, now can you die happy? Admission of love from a Strider? Cause that should be plenty of material to load you up in the dying-happy department.”_

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Fine. Good. Thank you.”

 _“Karkat—”_ he said, that smile still in his voice. Happy. There was the faint sound of a breath in, then a sharp succession of beeps. The phone had died.

Karkat let it beep without trying to stop it. It silenced itself after a few seconds anyway. He didn’t roll dramatically onto his back, staring up at the stars. Too many clouds for that anyway. He stayed where he was, twisted and bleeding and dying and, for once, happy.

Dying happy. The smiling voice of the boy-almost-man he loved—loved—in his ears.

_I love you too._

Got to say it once, he thought, and something like a smile curled his lips. Both of us. Just once.

Is once enough? Once shouldn’t be enough.

Once is enough.

You can remember once.


	2. Chapter 2

The phone rings at the exact moment that the AC creaks back into life. You take a languid second or two to grump internally at the fact that you have to move before you reach for the stupid contraption.

Despite the fact that you’re unreasonably disgruntled about the fact that someone’s calling you, the sight of the wall of all-caps text that you ironically copied and pasted to serve as Karkat’s contact title makes you grin. You press the accept button and wedge the phone between your chin and shoulder so you can start sorting through the tsunami of tabs that have slowly piled up in your wake for the past hour.

“Yo, wassup, Kitkat?”

 _“Your fucking ego, dumbass,”_ comes the slightly staticky reply. You can hear the smile in his voice. _“So far up that it’s stuck in God’s asshole.”_

Your grin gets bigger. You have taught him well. “Wow, rude,” you reply with no bite in your tone. You switch the phone to your hand briefly to adjust it, cracking your neck. “Why have I been graced with your sublime tones, then? What’s the deal?”

_“N—”_

His words disappear like he inhaled them straight back into his lungs, before reappearing several painful seconds later. _“Nothing much. Just . . . wanted to talk to you.”_

“Senpai noticed me,” you reply, expertly hiding the flicker of worry in the base of your throat. “I don’t even know what to say. Seriously, Karkat, what’s going on?”

You flick through your five most recent tabs and almost have a conniption when you land on the fourth. Holy fuck, when were you looking at _this_ website? _Why_ were you looking at this website? It looks like Satan and Polybius decided to get married and spat all their planning processes into this hellhole.

 _“Nothing, really!”_ Karkat snipes, snapping you out of your demonic wedding plan musings, and you can hear the familiar irritation underlining his words before his tone fades into a slightly worrying, desperately weak tone. _“Can we not have a simple, sane conversation one time? Is it too hard for you to refrain from referring to people as beautiful anime and quit with the metaphors?”_

“Okay, okay fine,” you say, half-exasperated. “What do you want to talk about? I stopped by Idea-mart earlier and they were fresh out of new stuff. Said the delivery guy never showed up, we’ll keep you in mind next time, sorry for the inconvenience, bye.” So much for quitting with the metaphors.

 _“Don’t really care,”_ Karkat half-whispers. _“Just talk. I want to listen. Please.”_

Okay, fuck, you’re really just a tiny bit worried now, but you shove it back down into the pit of your stomach and launch yourself headfirst into the biggest pile of horseshit you can conjure up. Grumpsters McShoutyface on the other end of the line doesn’t say anything for a long time, and, anxious, you’re just about to _make_ him say _something_ when he interrupts you.

 _“Dave,”_ he rasps, and you shut off your shitstream immediately. “Yeah?”

 _“Thanks,”_ he replies, his voice edging closer to inaudible. _“Just, yeah. Thanks. I love you.”_

You pause, then let out something akin to a laugh but more like an amused huff of some rare breed. “Okay,” you say, “I love you too. There, now can you die happy? Admission of love from a Strider? Cause that should be plenty of material to load you up in the dying-happy department.”

 _“Yes,”_ he tells you, _“yes. Fine. Good. Thank you.”_

“Karkat,” you say, still smiling, and the connection cuts off. A series of beeps spears in one eardrum, slices cleanly through your delicate brain tissue, and out the other, and you practically fling your phone away from you.

Once it and its seizure-inducing noises are a safe distance from your ears, you grin fondly at it (i.e. at Karkat, or where you last heard Karkat’s voice emitting from. What you really mean is whatever, fuck it. You’re grinning at the phone like a dweeb and it’s fucking weird, but you’re living in the moment, God, stop judging. Bitch). 

What a fucking huge dork. You know he’s up north helping with the nearest tours (why the idiot would ever want to help with those fuckawful mistakes trying to disguise themselves as not-even-halfway decent ideas you don’t know). You just can’t imagine why he would call you just to say he loved you. Since the game ended, you’ve kept in contact, but he’s never made a move on you until now. All this hinging on the fact of if that really counted as getting his mack on. It was pretty fucking out-of-context, if it was.

You try to abandon this thoroughly confusing thought train and instead sift gingerly through the rest of the tabs in your browser before slamming your stupid glitching piece-of-shit laptop shut (you really need to get Jade to take a look at it again, it’s being a bitch) and going to sleep practically minutes later without even a thought of personal hygiene, because priorities. Go you.

Your sleep is, blissfully, nightmare-free for the first time in weeks.

* * *

The fucking phone is ringing somewhere by your toes and you’re half asleep, the red numbers on your makeshift cinderblock bedside table telling you it’s the unwelcome hour of 4:06 AM. You blunder around in the dark for a while before you finally get your hands on your pantshittingly useless device, and of course by this time it’s stopped ringing.

You turn it on and the spear of light that shoots majestically from its touch screen pretty much blinds you. When you’ve finally stopped seeing fireworks you fumble through its controls until you get to previous calls, and stop dead when you see the most recent one.

Why the entire fuck would Kanaya be calling you at this time of night?

You open the message she left, panic thumping liked a caged animal in your chest. It’s perfunctory and chilling; _“Dave. Hello, um, I have news. Please call me back, I don’t want to tell you in a message.”_ Her tone sounds off somehow, like she has a head cold. Like she’s been crying.

You call back as quick as you can (making your suddenly sausage-esque fingers press the correct buttons is hard at four AM, dammit). It rings once, twice. Five and a half rings in total, and then the sound of someone answering travels jerkily across the connection.

“Kanaya?” you say, your voice pathetically bedroom-raspy, and your sister’s voice answers instead.

_“It’s Rose, Dave.”_

“Rose, thank fuck,” you gasp out, “what the actual bullshit is going on? Please tell me this isn’t serious?”

 _“Dave, this is going to hit you hard,”_ she tells you, her voice sliding automatically into her perfected reassuring, honeyed therapist tone. Underneath the sweetness, though, you can hear the blank cold shock almost certainly governing her each and every movement.

“Lay it on me, Lalonde, and don’t sugarcoat this shit. I want to know what the fuck happened.” Your heart really needs to stop training for Olympic racing, fuck. It’s hard enough concentrating here without this stupid fucking organ doing laps in your chest.

She takes a deep breath, like a diver about to take the plunge off the highest springboard of her life, and starts talking, her tone horribly business-like. _“As you know, the tours were moving smoothly with Karkat being the only one of us helping at the moment. Last night, his body was discovered a fair distance from the Wind and Shade route. He’d been stabbed roughly an hour earlier, and there was no sign of the culprit or even the weapon used, although detectives are almost positive it was a traditional katana. His phone was inches from his hand and out of battery when he was discovered. The police are aware you were the last person he had called, and they wanted to interview you, to see if he’d left any clues in his correspondence. I told them I wanted to break the news to you first, and . . . here I am.”_ Her voice trails off into hopelessness.

You’re almost sure you’re hallucinating. Trancelike, you look down at yourself, then at your clock. 4:11. As you watch, the 11 changes to 12.

Either this is an insanely accurate dream, or your whole world is crashing down around your ears.

_“Dave? Are you still there?”_

Even if you could muster up any sort of noise, you don’t think you would have responded.

_“Dave?”_

Her voice echoes in your ears.

_“Dave, I’m sorry.”_

She’s not. No, she is, but it’s no use. Why the fuck would being sorry ever be able to _bring him back_ —

_“Dave, he would want you to come up north for his funeral.”_

You don’t reply. She sighs over the line. _“I’m going to come get you. I’ll be there sometime tomorrow, I promise. Try to take care of yourself. I love you.”_

He told you he loved you. Some of his last words were _I love you_ , and you’d treated it as some kind of joke. You’d _laughed_ at him.

He told you he loved you, and you hadn’t even replied with any semblance of genuinity.

He told you he loved you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heyyooooo I did it, I wrote more. Fuck real-life priorities, I want to make Dave MISERABLE.
> 
> Okay so I can practically hear you all screaming "WHAT THE FUCK????????? WHAT ARE THESE TOURS????????????? ' _WIND AND SHADE ROUTE_ '?????????? WHAT THE ACTUAL FLYING BUTTFUCK?????????????" Have no fear, my friends, for all will be explained. In other words, this is going to be a fucking multi-chapter fic, because I have no commitment or self-control and I like starting new things more than I like finishing them. However, I do have a lot of this fucker planned out, so have no fear that it'll just be abandoned bc it won't be (also I have you peeps to inspire me when I start slagging. Just slap me smartly about the face and tell me to get it the fuck together, you want more and I should write it. Honestly. Sometimes it's what I need. Kthxbai!)


	3. Chapter 3

Fitting that today, the day Karkat Vantas is incinerated into a billion useless ashes, would carry the first bite of winter in the wind.

You stand there, hands shoved deep into your suit pockets like you’re trying to find something in there that can hold you down, keep you from screaming and curling up into a tiny ball, a pinpoint of acute pain on the frozen ground. And it _is_ pain, it’s physical misery to sit there, watch a tall, overweight blueblood preach about “Mr. Vantas’ strict morals that brought nothing but joy to the world” and his “incomparable influences on this new earth”. Karkat was more than a lecture from some old shitblob who didn’t know him. Karkat was more than dust on the wind. Karkat was more than the first snow.

Karkat was more.

Jade is pressed up beside you, her head on your shoulder and her tears getting your nice silk jacket all damp. You don’t give a fuck. Her contact might be the only thing keeping you on this planet, seeing as you still haven’t found an anchor in these shitty pockets of yours.

Her shampoo smells like artificial coconut and you inhale it deeply, trying to not listen to this fucking useless priest and instead remember Karkat the way you knew him, the way you knew he really was. How much he changed since the game ended. How much better he became once you all could be together, really get to know each other, in the peace of the world you made.

* * *

You like to think that your first thought on a brand new earth was suitably ironic: _Goddamn, that’s some bright sunlight_.

When the aftershocks of the stupid new sun fade from your delicate visual ellipsoids, you look around, and if this were a cheesy old book your jaw would have literally dropped.

You’re surrounded by the tallest shitting trees you’ve ever seen, and there are _two fucking suns_ traversing the sky. In the distance, you can hear the familiar sound of some kind of city going about its daily life, although the smell of exhaust and cigarette smoke that a settlement as big as this one sounds usually carries around with it is blissfully absent. Believe it or not, though, you’re not scared. The game hardened you to fear. There’s not a whole lot that could seriously scare you now.

The urge to explore is almost unbearable. Not knowing what else to do, not even knowing where you are at this point, you start walking.

It’s fifteen point seven seven eight two minutes when you finally emerge from the woods (seriously, they’re big and imposing enough to be in Harry Potter) and stop dead.

The city in front of you is one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen.

There are stone buildings the literal shape of elegance, detailed with the most delicate designs you’ve ever seen. They’re mossy-viney-overgrown, but they’re clearly inhabited. You keep moving, walking closer to them absolutely dumbstruck, and as you move farther into the streets winding around these huge buildings still surrounded by trees (albeit smaller ones) you start seeing cars, old-looking designs that you don’t recognize where no two are the same shape or color. There are strip malls and little shops lining streets and big department stores and houses and parks, but the buildings are so different, stone and plant and surrounded by trees, and so incredibly beautiful that you’re seriously disoriented.

It’s the literal weirdest mixture of old and modern you could have ever imagined, and you fucking love it.

Your feet eventually carry you to something like a city square. In the center of the plaza, standing majestically in a fountain, is an enormous statue, and as you look at it more and more you start to recognize it, and this time your jaw just maybe really does fall open.

It’s John motherfucking Egbert.

Not a very good representation of him, to be honest. John was never that ripped, and his shitty god-tier costume was never that nice-looking, but it’s definitely the old Egderp, with his stupid square frames and his mess of hair and the moronic swirly insignia on his chest.

You look around yourself, at the people surrounding you, and yet again you just maybe have a little bit of a conniption, because _there are fucking trolls walking peacefully among humans like they’ve lived together all their life_.

Where the _fuck_ are you?

“Dave?”

You turn arounds so fast you nearly trip on your cool-as-fuck cape, and then John himself in the flesh and blood, dressed in his windy costume, is running towards you with that stupid dorky adorable grin on his face, the one where you can see all thirty-two of his fucking teeth, and when he slams into you he takes you both down.

He’s shaking against you and you might just be shaking as well, and when he stops hugging you hard enough to cut off blood flow he pulls away and shit, is he crying?

He helps you to your feet and then he’s sobbing but still smiling, what the fuck, you’re so confused and happy and scared and you clutch him like a lifeline.

“Dave, we did it, we made it,” he tells you in a voice that’s almost broken but also so full of happiness you think it might just explode in your face and send little bits of nasty happy Egbert all over this fucking weirdass city square, and it hits you like that stupid Egbert statue fell over and squashed you flat with pure realization.

“We really made it?” you say, your grip on John’s arm tightening to the point of white-knuckledness. “We’re really out of the fucking game? Are you shitting me Egbert, please do not be shitting me, this is—are we really out? Are we really fucking free?”

He nods, grins, cries, and then you’re crying too and hugging him and you don’t give a shit because, you’re out, you’re free, and there’s a new world where you can live again with all your friends.

“Where’s everyone else?” you ask when you finally pry yourself away from him, and he looks around for barely seconds before his face lights up like the twin suns above you.

“John! Dave! Oh my _God_!”

You whirl around and Jade is running towards you with—holy _fuck_ , that’s Karkat behind her, that’s Karkat and Jade and they’re really here on this real pavement in the shadow of that stupid-ass ripped Egderp statue—

Your feet start moving without you even remotely ordering them too, and before you can take another breath you’ve got your arms locked tight around Jade and you’re fucking spinning her, how cliché can you get but you don’t care because she’s here and she’s breathing and she smells like fire and ashes and death but she exists and you have her again.

When you finally put her down her smile is wide enough to fill your entire range of vision, and she stretches up to kiss you on the cheek. Fuck these tingly feelings, she’s just your friend, and you’re so fucking happy to see her you could just about up and fall over dead from joy.

You turn to the prime specimen of _grumpicus dorkus_ standing awkwardly beside John, looking as if he’s not sure if he should say hello or slap him. He’s got the sleeves of his stupid turtleneck shoved up to his elbows, and your eyes catch on the lines of his forearms and the visible bones of his wrists, the slight trembling of his chin, the almost-smile hovering behind his mouth, the tension strung along below his velvet-gray skin.

“Hey,” you say, and your voice fucking breaks, of course. He smiles, and _fuck_ that’s a nice smile, crooked and with a hint of fangs and unbearably happy.

“Think we should hug?” you say, not able to stop the smile spreading across your own face.

“It certainly seems like your idiotfuck friends expect us to.”

“Well, should we disappoint them or not?”

His smile gets wider, holy _fuck_ you like it when he smiles like this, and he steps forward. When he wraps his arms around you his head fits just under your chin if he tucks his own chin a little, and he’s inhumanly warm even through his clothes and your stupid god tier pajamas.

“Okay, wow, way to make us all awkward, guys,” says John, and you open your eyes with an enormous grin on your face. You pull away, Karkat trying to scowl at John and failing utterly, and Jade giggles, tearfully, but she laughs, and despite the confusion of this new, unidentified place, the disorientation of the game being _over_ , over at _last_ , and the driving urge to find the rest of your friends, you can tell you’re all going to be all right.

* * *

“Dave?”

It’s John, in a solemn navy suit, walking towards you through the dispersing crowd. The lecture is over, the memorial is done. Karkat’s officially gone now, and the realization hits you like a sucker punch.

John’s trying to look remotely cheerful, but you know him too well. You can see the underlying emotion; it’s something like sadness but also like anger, like he’s resentful that something this terrible would _dare_ to happen to him and his friends.

“Yeah.” Your voice is a croak. You give Jade a squeeze and leave her where she is to follow him.

John puts an arm over your shoulders and doesn’t say anything as he leads you away, but you don’t hug him back. Jade understands what you were going through better than John would; she was almost as close to Karkat as you were. Almost.

“Listen, Dave,” he says. Thankfully you don’t have to look him in the eye when he gives you this speech on how he relates to your grief and how he knows what you’re going through and it there anything he can do to help you. Fucking asshole got too nice when he grew up.

“You can’t clam up,” he tells you, his voice almost bitter. “I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to hole up in your fucking room and you’re going to let yourself fall to pieces. You can’t fucking do that, Dave.”

You hide your surprise behind the slickest pokerface of all time. “I’m not going to,” you tell him.

“Yes, you fucking are,” he says, definitely angry now. “Do you have any idea how selfish that is, Dave? Do you have _any_ idea how horribly, horribly selfish that is, to do that to your friends?” He’s almost shouting now.

You don’t want to be yelled at. You feel like an absolute wimp but Karkat’s dead and John is yelling at you and you feel like you don’t know him anymore, like you don’t know your best friend at all.

“Yeah, I have a little bit of an idea,” you start, but he interrupts you with something like a sob in his voice.

“No, you _fucking_ don’t, and it’s not okay.” His tone is softer now, his anger spent. You don’t think he was ever really angry. “I’m not going to let you do that to yourself, you dumbfuck. You have to keep living. Take a road trip. Help with the tours, I don’t give a shit—just do something with yourself. Don’t—don’t die. I don’t think I could handle it if you died too.”

It hits you that maybe, just maybe, he knew Karkat better than he was letting on. You’re probably blowing this shit up out of proportion like always, but the only thing this triggers in you is unadulterated jealousy. How _dare_ Karkat get close to anyone but you. How _dare_ he just up and fucking die, just fucking leave you here in this stupid-ass world you created in a game you didn’t even want to play.

But you were the last person he called in his dying moments. You were the first thought on his mind. You were the one he chose. It’s no comfort, but it keeps you breathing and going and not hating John. Not hating Jade. Not hating Terezi, Gamzee, anyone else who might have stolen his last words from you.

“Dave, promise you’ll stay alive. Please.”

You wrap your arm around him like he’s got his around you. Grip his shoulder as tight as you can.

“I promise I’ll try.”


End file.
